Everyone is talking about how Microsoft Office 365 is suddenly beating Google Apps

Microsoft has been telling us for eons that it is eating Google Apps’ lunch, but hasn’t backed that up with cold, hard figures.

Now, all of a sudden, sources all over the tech industry are noticing that Office 365 is everywhere.

And it’s all because of one thing: Microsoft is telling customers to move their email to Microsoft’s cloud instead of buying another Exchange server and hosting email in their own data centres, says Todd McKinnon, co-founder and CEO of Okta.

Office 365 usage has ‘skyrocketed’

OktaOffice 365 is quickly becoming the most used cloud app at work, this chart from Okta shows.

Take Okta, for example. Okta offers a security service that helps companies keep track of employee passwords and accounts to all the cloud services the enterprise uses.

It has over 2,000 customers tracking 4 million users, cofounder and CEO Todd McKinnon tells us.

“Over the last six to nine months, Office 365 usage has skyrocketed,” he told us. “We see it on our network. We see usage of applications.”

Up until last October, Google Apps was more popular, he said, and Salesforce and Box were the most popular apps used at work.

That’s all changed. “Office 365 hasn’t quite taken over Salesforce.com yet, but it probably will in the next few months,” he says.

“It’s like a tidal wave,” McKinnon says. “Every company is looking to solve identity and mobility challenges because Microsoft is telling them to move email to the cloud.”

Others see Office 365 everywhere, too

Okta is not alone in telling us this. Security service BetterCloud, which was 100% focused on security tools for Google Apps, just launched an Office 365 beta two weeks ago because it was getting so many inquiries from companies asking it for Office 365, a spokesperson told Business Insider.

Ditto for BitGlass, which also offers security services for Google Apps, Office 365 and Salesforce. In a survey of 81,000 users conducted a year ago, it found that Google Apps was far more popular, accounting for 16% of user’s email, compared to Office 365 at not quite 8%.

In a survey it plans to release next week, the company revealed to Business Insider that Office 365 has now overtaken Google Apps in terms of usage.

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My view is that everybody is jumping on the cloud bandwagon. This means current exchange users move to Office 365 because they already invested heavily in the MS ecosystem and would be foolish to do otherwise. We need to ask ourselves what percentage of those 29% for Office 365 are actual conversions and if we are supposed to take them into account. The rise of office 365 will continue until everybody owning exchange moves to cloud solutions. Only then we will see the actual capability of the platforms to attract new users.